Geoff Schumacher

AMES, Iowa — I’m still in recovery.

I arrived home around midnight on May 1. I was very tired, worn out from my three-day trip to the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. But when I got into the condo and dropped my things, I decided for some reason that it was time to take out the kitchen trash. I tied up the bag and walked to the dumpster, which is only about 40 feet from my front door. As I reached for the dumpster’s lid, I had a sensation — one of those sensations that novelists always have trouble describing, a feeling that something isn’t quite right, that what I’m doing might not work out exactly the way I expect.

Indeed. As I lifted the lid to throw in the bag, there was a noise, the frantic scrabbling of a beast within. I was startled — okay, I freaked out briefly. I let go of the lid and leaped backward with a shout as what turned out to be a raccoon scooted through the space between the dumpster and the descending lid. All would have been fine except that in my haste to back away from the animal, I tripped and fell awkwardly to the blacktop.

I tore up my left elbow, as well as the palm of my right hand. I also bruised my hip. Nothing serious, but the row of scabs on and around my elbow is a hindrance to getting dressed and such.

My wife thinks this is pretty funny. “Watch out for Ricky Raccoon!” she’s said several times since. My younger daughter thinks I’m a wuss for being afraid of a little raccoon. She’s right and wrong, of course. She’s right that there’s no reason to be afraid of a raccoon. He’s more afraid of me than I of him. But she’s wrong in the sense that I didn’t know what was in that dumpster. Having moved to the Midwest just a couple of weeks before, I wasn’t familiar with the notion of wildlife of this sort rooting around near your house. It’s very unlikely that anything other than a sad human will be found in an apartment dumpster in Las Vegas. Plus, it was past midnight, dark, and cold, and I was tired as hell.

Anyway, I’ve been leery of that dumpster ever since. I’ve opened it trepidatiously probably five times since then, and no raccoon has jumped out. It probably won’t happen again, but that experience will come to mind every time for a while.

Keeping with the animal theme, let’s talk about the armadillo. You read that right. Armadillos are commonplace in the South, but it’s unusual for them to make an appearance this far north. But it happened this week in the small town of Cambridge, about 15 miles south of Ames.

According to a story in today’s Ames Tribune, a man named Wade Kahler noticed some sort of roadkill on the shoulder of his driveway. He called a city maintenance employee, Dale Hennick, who came out and discovered it was a dead armadillo. He tossed it in the back of his pickup.

Apparently, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources receives “a couple of armadillo reports a year . . . but they are always roadkills.” It’s not clear how the armored creatures get to Iowa, but I would speculate that they somehow end up here by catching a ride on some sort of vehicle, kind of like roof rats in Las Vegas. Otherwise, it’s an awfully long walk.

For the record, it’s illegal to transport an armadillo into Iowa. I don’t know why. (I wonder if Nevada has a similar law.)

Here’s the kicker, from the final two sentences of the article:

“Hennick has no idea what he will do with the curious carcass. ‘I guess I’ll just put him in the refrigerator for now,’ he said.”

Wait: Why does Hennick think the thing to do is to put this dead animal in a refrigerator? Why would he do that? When you don’t know what to do with a dead animal, your plan is to put it in a refrigerator? That would only make sense if he . . . he . . . planned to cook the thing and eat it!

Surely that’s not what he intends to do. Surely.